If you wish to have the patient name and/or ID available for finding studies relating to a specific patient, but do
not need to identify who that patient is, then it is possible to create an ‘encrypted’ version of the ID or name. In this
case, a one-way SHA 256 hash is generated and the hash value is stored instead.

If exactly the same name or ID (including spelling, spacing, case etc) occurs more than once, then the same hash
will be generated.

The same applies to accession numbers if the option to encrypt the accession number is selected.

Users in the pidgroup will have extra export buttons available in the modality pages:

If the IDs or names are encrypted, then these columns will contain the hash rather than the original values. However, it
will be possible to see if more than one study belongs to one patient as the values should be the same for both. Due to
the nature of the algorithm however, a single change in the name or ID - such as an upper case letter instead of a lower
case one - will be recorded as a completely different hash value.

Any exports with either patient name or patient ID included will also have a date of birth column.